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Starting a community requires patience

In the social media age, everyone wants to start an online community about every topic and for every product you can imagine. The reality, like with most things, is that 90% of them fail. The biggest reason these communities fail is a lack of patience on the part of the person starting the community.

You need patience because for the participant putting yourself out there in a new community is scary. It’s a bunch of people you don’t know. You don’t know how they’ll respond. Most people are pretty guarded. They don’t wanna take the risk.

The best thing you can do is to be patient and be consistent. Continue to participate in the online community and get your close friends to participate. You need to set the example and tone for what you expect within the community. Everyone else will follow your lead.

Even then, you’re only going to get a small number of people to really contribute. The rule with online communities is that 10% contribute and 90% just consume what the others contribute. But keep patient.

I started the DC Tech Facebook Group years ago. I kept a steady hand throughout and now it has 1800 people. I never have to worry about it going stale because we’ve hit enough of a scale where there’s always someone posting something.

Once you hit a community of that scale, there are people that’ll wanna use its platforms as a way to draw undue attention on themselves but that’s a whole ‘nother blog post.